The late author Jack Kerouac was best known for his novel On the Road that helped define the beat movement in the middle of the last century. But some of his lesser-known works recall a boyhood spent in the hardscrabble town of Lowell, Mass.
In these works Kerouac takes readers to the banks of the Merrimack River, which he describes allegorically as both a mysterious animal lurking in the shadows, and the life-giving bloodstream of the town. In fact, the Merrimack and Lowell are (not so uncommonly) linked like mother and son. In the century before Kerouac, the former frontier outpost was chosen by a group of Bostonian businessmen as the site for textile mills. The river drove those mills and helped fuel the industrialization and urbanization of the area about 50 miles northwest of Boston.